You should have a boilerplate reply which lists things you're usually interested in, things you're sometimes interested in and things you're never interested in. But yes, "please contact me" emails and the like do seem to indicate a failure to think things through properly.

Hmm, yes, the boilerplate reply sounds like quite a good idea, although this doesn't come up quite often enough for it to seem worth the effort (though it does come up just often enough for me to wonder about it).

Thinking about it further, I suppose that provided the opening email at least mentions PuTTY (which they do generally manage to, and that's one of the ways I decide they're not spam) it does at least avoid the risk of the sender typing up a huge project description and then finding they've sent it to completely the wrong address by mistake. Though in that situation you'd think they could easily enough recover it from their outgoing mail archive and send it to the right address instead...

The other thing that might be good is a FAQ bit re suggestions.
ie: Feature suggestion: this has been suggested already and is a nice to have but extremely technically difficult and timeconsuming so low-priority unless you want to fund this.. *grin*.

You probably get lots of the same suggestions over and over again...

-grue-

Like this? (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/#pending)

To be fair, people don't always know simont from Joe Bloggs - they might wish to establish the email address is still current, that it's a real person rather than a marketing company (who may try to take and sell their idea) etc. I can well understand that people will want to feel out their potential contact before committing effort to them.